Strongly Worded

Excused Absence?

So I've been a blogger slacker this week, which is especially embarrassing because an honor has been bestowed upon me! The lovely Jenifer (who looks a bit like Julia Stiles, has a really cool life in Seattle, and is married to a former chef) has named me her blog crush. This fills me with joy because she gets tons of traffic and is so revered on the Internet that someone actually stole her photo off flickr and used it to lure unsuspecting men on match.com.

So what have I been doing rather than blogging? Well, for starters, shoveling a collective ten inches of fucking snow off of my porch, steps, sidewalk, and car. This SUCKS. I care not one iota about a winter wonderland of any kind. I want snow OFF of my person, my immediate environment, and my belongings. On Sunday I stood in the slush, heaving piles of snow (and when you live in a dense community like mine, there aren't many places for the snow to actually go), and asking myself why I voluntarily subject myself to living in this climate. Then I called my friend R.I.B.S., and we had a lovely chat while I sipped hot cocoa and she reported that the climate in LA is a little overcast, so she just left the pool outside her condo.

There's that. There's also this massive conference/training/educational extravaganza that I'm planning for my foster job. In January, I will be implementing two eight-day events at the Very Prestigious School (VPS) where I work. The events will engage 234 students, 26 industry parters, ten faculty members, ten student workers, three deans, two guest speakers, and a partridge in a pear tree. This event involves many different rooms on campus, including the Glee Room, which is part of the Engineering fiefdom, and thus unavailable to non-engineering peeps. However, said room is the only large room on the entire campus that has square tables, so yesterday I brought homemade cookies over there to entreat their staff to let us use the space. (Square tables are really vital for some reason; I still don't understand why.) My boss said she didn't care what we had to do. Wash the director's car. Provide cookies. Beg. Whatever it takes.

Then, I have also been grading final papers for my delightful online class, which is over, thank God (though I will be teaching it again in the spring). With few exceptions, the papers were hideous, and I spent some time trying to find some positive feedback to give a student who wrote six rambling pages about "the mommy wars", which included the following sentence: "mothers who stay at home give mothers who work guilt because they can stay home all day and do the laundry and take care of the children and they dont ship them off to a babysiter. The mothers who work have more money to buy there kids toys like the Hello Kitty birthday set, but they hardly ever see their kid [sic]." This is a 300 level course, my friends.

So. Hopefully the snow will melt and things will calm down. At least a little.

Posted by Dori at 7:31 AM